Question

Using PHP, I’d like to get the total memory available to the system (not just the free or used memory).

On Linux it’s quite straight forward. You can do:

$memory = fopen('/proc/meminfo');

and then parse the file.

Is anyone aware of an equivalent method for Windows? I’m open to any suggestions.

Edit: We have a solution (but StackOverflow won’t let me answer my own question):

exec( 'systeminfo', $output );

foreach ( $output as $value ) {
    if ( preg_match( '|Total Physical Memory\:([^$]+)|', $value, $m ) ) {
        $memory = trim( $m[1] );
}

Not the most elegant solution, and it’s very slow, but it suits my need.

Answer 1

You can do this via exec:

exec('wmic memorychip get capacity', $totalMemory);
print_r($totalMemory);

This will print (on my machine having 2×2 and 2×4 bricks of RAM):

Array
(
    [0] => Capacity
    [1] => 4294967296
    [2] => 2147483648
    [3] => 4294967296
    [4] => 2147483648
    [5] =>
)

You can easily sum this by using

echo array_sum($totalMemory);

which will then give 12884901888. To turn this into Kilo-, Mega- or Gigabytes, divide by 1024 each, e.g.

echo array_sum($totalMemory) / 1024 / 1024 / 1024; // GB

Additional command line ways of querying total RAM can be found in

• https://superuser.com/questions/315195/is-there-a-command-to-find-out-the-available-memory-in-windows

---

Another programmatic way would be through COM:

// connect to WMI
$wmi = new COM('WinMgmts:root/cimv2');

// Query this Computer for Total Physical RAM
$res = $wmi->ExecQuery('Select TotalPhysicalMemory from Win32_ComputerSystem');

// Fetch the first item from the results
$system = $res->ItemIndex(0);

// print the Total Physical RAM
printf(
    'Physical Memory: %d MB', 
    $system->TotalPhysicalMemory / 1024 /1024
);

For details on this COM example, please see:

• http://php.net/manual/en/book.com.php
• MSDN: Constructing a Moniker String
• MSDN: Win32_ComputerSystem class

You can likely get this information from other Windows APIs, like the .NET API., as well.

---

There is also PECL extension to do this on Windows:

• win32_ps_stat_mem — Retrieves statistics about the global memory utilization.

According to the documentation, it should return an array which contains (among others) a key named total_phys which corresponds to “The amount of total physical memory.“

But since it’s a PECL extension, you’d first have to install it on your machine.